Family Law Matters - Katherine O'Donovan

In this radical critique, Professor O'Donovan challenges conventional textbooks which assume that marriage is the essential feature of family life and that the patriarchal unit remains dominant.
She shows how the key players in family law discourse - women and children - are largely excluded and argues that it is the birth of children, rather than marriage, which is the constitutive element of the family.

Katherine O'Donovan is Professor of Family Law and Legal Theory at the University of Kent at Canterbury. She is the author of many books and articles on family law and feminist legal theory.

'Invaluable as a compendium of ideas, and as a starting point, for the longer term project of theorising family law'
John Dewar, Hertford College, Oxford University